Happy-End (1996)
Genre :
Runtime : 12M
Director : Peter Tscherkassky
Synopsis
A found footage film about rituals, festive occasions and a married couple in a seeming frenzy of cosy togetherness. We see the pair pouring drinks, cutting cakes, making toast. Finally the exuberant movement of the dancing woman freezes.
Seances, co-created with the National Film Board of Canada, presents a wholly new way of experiencing film narrative. By dynamically generating a series of film sequences in unique configurations, potentially hundreds of thousands of new stories are conjured by code. Each will exist only in the moment—no pausing, scrubbing, or sharing—offering the audience one chance to see the generated film. This project, co-created by the ever imaginative Guy Maddin, is a visual discourse on the impact of loss within film. All the sequences pay homage to lost silent films from the early day of cinema. Seances is nostalgic but it is also frequently hilarious. Part of the joy and sadness of Seances is that many possible narratives are created but they can be only viewed once before they disappear forever.
"Waiting for Godot" on ice and snow, without words. Against a barren winter landscape, a figure approaches: it's a man, pulling a small sleigh on which another man sits, plucking a dead bird. They stop to trade places; the one now on the sleigh takes out his knitting. Accidents, misunderstandings, disagreements, and an outright fight await our absurd protagonists as their trip to nowhere continues, first with one pulling, then the other. What if they were to lose the sleigh? What rules of civilization and partnership would guide them then?
The rules were: one day, one wheel, one shot (no editing). Valérie Massadian’s hypnotic short was made for Seattle’s Northwest Film Forum.
An aspiring actor in Hollywood meets an enigmatic stranger by the name of Tommy Wiseau, the meeting leads the actor down a path nobody could have predicted; creating the worst movie ever made.
In this short exploration of sensual audio-visual stimulation, the repeated rituals of an online performer have a transfixing effect on her viewers. What starts as an exploration of tactility, addiction and control soon descends into a nightmarish dance performance where no rules apply.
Dr. Daniel Challis and Ellie Grimbridge stumble onto a gruesome murder scheme when Ellie's novelty-salesman father, Harry, is killed while in possession of a halloween mask made by the Silver Shamrock mask company. The company's owner, Conal Cochran, wants to return Halloween to its darker roots using his masks -- and his unspeakable scheme would unleash death and destruction across the country.
When a team of backpackers sets out to explore the Indian jungles, one of them is bitten by a poisonous spider and killed.
A professional cellist has an encounter with a stranger on the subway which has unexpected and far-reaching ramifications on his life.
Parallel Space: Inter-View is made with a photo camera. A miniature photo is exactly the size of two film frames. Optically it resembles a flickering double exposure; the former temporal and spatial unity disintegrates into pieces which have a correspondence with each other. (Peter Tscherkassky) Photographic processes - the material transformations involved in recording, developing, printing and projecting - functions as metaphors for psychological processes.
Near the end of World War II, the survivors of a torpedoed hospital ship cling to life aboard a crowded lifeboat. With no food, water, or shelter, all seems lost – until an eerily silent German minesweeper drifts ominously towards them, giving them one last chance at survival. As our motley crew explores the ship, it becomes all too clear that some diabolical fate has befallen its German crew. The mystery only deepens when they encounter a young Romanian girl, apparently the sole survivor, who leads them to a locked room in the bowels of the vessel.
This pioneering documentary film depicts the lives of the indigenous Inuit people of Canada's northern Quebec region. Although the production contains some fictional elements, it vividly shows how its resourceful subjects survive in such a harsh climate, revealing how they construct their igloo homes and find food by hunting and fishing. The film also captures the beautiful, if unforgiving, frozen landscape of the Great White North, far removed from conventional civilization.
A short film made for "Venezia 70 - Future Reloaded."
A short film directed by Paul Schrader following the story of a painting from Schrader's collection.
Six American grad students have arrived in Africa to study apes with a renowned professor. But after setting up camp in a jungle clearing, they soon become witness to the carnage inflicted by the strange and remote species.
The services of shark killer have been engaged by his brother Jake, the head of a West Coast crime ring. The gig: kill the black-finned shark that swallowed a valuable diamond during a gang transaction.
Documents the lives of infamous fakers Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving. De Hory, who later committed suicide to avoid more prison time, made his name by selling forged works of art by painters like Picasso and Matisse. Irving was infamous for writing a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes. Welles moves between documentary and fiction as he examines the fundamental elements of fraud and the people who commit fraud at the expense of others.
A woman on a meadow, strolling around, narcisstically involved, wandering. Now and again one can see her breasts through her half-opened shirt. The camera films with a powerful telephoto lens. This idyll is radically destroyed when the woman suddenly looks directly into the camera. There is an immediate cut (the voyeur has been discovered) and the whole sequence of events begins from the beginning again, but each time re-filmed from the last till finally, only a completely abstract, flickering picture remains.
An unreleased 9 minute trailer for F for Fake directed by Orson Welles as promotional reel for the film's American release.
Bugs is in drag as the Valkyrie Brunhilde, who is pursued by Elmer playing the demigod Siegfried.